Lund University

Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies

Conference on Entrepreneurship and Finance in memory of Ola Bengtsson, May 28 – 29, 2015, Lund

Ola Bengtsson was a scholar whose work focused on entrepreneurship, small business finance, and venture capital. After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2006, Ola taught at Cornell and at the University of Illinois. In 2012, he joined Lund University in Sweden as Full Professor of Finance and Director of the Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies (KWC). Ola tragically passed away in January 2014, and in honor of his memory a conference will be held in Lund, Sweden, on May 28-29, 2015.

We are honored to welcome a long line of prominent speakers to the conference.

The Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies (Knut Wicksells centrum för finansvetenskap) has received funding from VINNOVA to establish a centre for finance at the Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM).

The basic goal of the Wicksell Centre is to conduct high-quality research in the finance area, and to engage in mutually beneficial collaboration with practitioners. In more specific terms the activities focus on:

attaining high quality in research;

asserting the relevance of its activities in interaction with practitioners;

building an attractive environment for research and outreach in order to recruit new researchers – on permanent, time-limited and visiting basis – nationally and internationally.

The Wicksell Centre conduct multidisciplinary research and education, drawing from the resources of one of Scandinavia’s biggest universities, exploiting links to several departments and institutions. Research at the Centre is organised in three thematic platforms:

The Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm is an important part of the Centre. While LUSEM has broad strengths in financial research, IFN has strong competences and networks in corporate finance, entrepreneurship, venture capital, innovation and growth. Together, these strengths make the Knut Wicksell Centre of Financial Studies well equipped to deal with current and future challenges within the multidisciplinary field of finance.